cambridge university press 978-0-521-84310-2 - the old country:...

We are a nation of gardeners, and we take pleasure in tending ourbackyards. But this pleasure sits uneasily with our knowledge that the places where

most of us live are running out of water. We suspect that our lawns and many of our European plants are too demanding of scarce supplies, but can’t imagine

our streets and gardens without them.

The Old Country opens our eyes, and minds, to other possibilities. It does so by telling us stories about our natural landscape.We discover how much of our

history has been tied up with plant exploration, from William Dampier’s first foraysat Shark Bay in Western Australia to the amazing recent discovery in the Blue

Mountains of the Wollemi Pine, representing a whole new genus.We learn about the statuesque boab of the Kimberley and its interesting relations,

and the allure the banksia family holds for artists.

George Seddon believes that the better we understand the delicacy and beauty of our natural environment, the more ‘at home’ we will feel as Australians. He

explores garden design, and wonders whether the present trend to Mediterraneanplants creates more problems than it solves. He looks at what ‘native’ or ‘exotic’ oreven ‘a weed’ might mean, and concludes that these notions are surprisingly fluid.

This passionate, wise and witty book, enriched with breathtakingly beautifulillustrations, suggests that the answers to our water problems lie here, at home.

George Seddon AM is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Melbourne and a Senior Research Associate at the University

of Western Australia. He has held chairs in four disciplines and taught inuniversities across Europe and North America. His recent books include

Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

© Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press978-0-521-84310-2 - The Old Country: Australian Landscapes, Plants and PeopleGeorge SeddonFrontmatterMore information

http://www.cambridge.org/0521843103

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The OLDCOUNTRY

Australian Landscapes,Plants and People

George Seddon

With photographs by Colin Totterdell






CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESSCambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.orgInformation on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521843102

© George Seddon 2005

This publication is copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevantcollective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without thewritten permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2005

Printed in Australia by BPA Print Group

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication data

Seddon, George, 1927– .The old country: Australian landscapes, plants and people.

Includes index.

ISBN 0 521 84310 3.

ISBN 9 78052184 3102.

ISBN-13 978-0-521-84310-2 hardbackISBN-10 0-521-84310-3 hardback

1. Plant collecting – Australia – History. 2. Landscape changes –Australia. 3. Native plants gardening – Australia. 4. Plants, Ornamental –Australia. 5. Botany – Australia. 6. Human ecology – Australia. I.Title.

581.70994

ISBN-13 978-0-521-84310-2 hardbackISBN-10 0-521-84310-3 hardback

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C o n t e n t s

Acknowledgements vii

Preface xi

Introduction 1

1 First Encounters 27

2 The Boab 43

3 Learning 65

4 The Conifers 89

5 The Banksias 125

6 Mediterraneity 155

7 On Being Deciduous 173

8 By Design 191

9 Weeds 217

Epilogue 233

Notes 245

Bibliography 249

List of Illustrations 255

Index 259






A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s

Without the help of those named below, the generous useof colour in this book would not have been possible.Their financialsupport has been for me more than that; it is also an endorsement ofmy two primary aims: a better awareness of the richness, diversityand interest of our own flora, and of the urgent need for a muchmore rational use of water in our gardens, especially in the capitalcities.

Fremantle Ports, which is strongly committed to caring for the environment, has provided support for this book, as have thethree major southern-city botanic gardens: Kings Park in Perth,the Adelaide Botanic Garden, and the Royal Botanic GardensMelbourne to mark the opening in 2006 of the first eleven hectaresof the Australian Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne,a new garden celebrating Australia’s remarkable plant life andlandscapes.Their support is acknowledged with pleasure and thanks.

Another contributor is Melbourne Water, which is acutely awareof our need to make better use of a resource we have taken too much for granted in Australia.There are three private donors, allof them well known for their history of support for betterenvironmental planning: the Norman Wettenhall Estate, Jan Schapperand, finally, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. The help of all the above is a vote of confidence, not so much in this book as in the aims towhich it is directed. The last-named has contributed so much toAustralia, in so many ways, that this book is dedicated to her, as mysmall tribute.

The source or author of the images in this book is indicatedboth in the List of Illustrations and/or with each image as it occursin the text. I would like to thank all the many generous contributorsfor what in my view is the best part of the book, and toacknowledge sources in general terms.

Most of the photographic images come from the archives of myfriend Colin Totterdell. He is one of the world’s great photographersof landscape and flora, the equal of men like Ansell Adams inAmerica and Olegas Truchanas in Tasmania, but he has rarelyreceived due recognition. Other photographic images come from

v i i






Jock Clough, Simon Griffiths, John Hanrahan, Stephen Hopper,Michal Lewi, Brian and Diana Snape, and Pamla Toler. A few arefrom my own collection.

The non-photographic images are also diverse in origin, and ithas been a privilege to be permitted to use them.They include fineline-drawings by David Hutchison, and the lovely rendering ofBanksia ashbyi by Celia Rosser, for which I owe thanks both to her and to Monash University. The non-photographic Dampierillustrations and most of the Banksia illustrations are taken from rarebooks in the special collections of the Reid Library of the Universityof Western Australia. Catherine Clark took a great deal of trouble tolocate what I needed and to arrange for these fragile pages, whichdate from 1781 to 1830, to be photographed by Dennis Sarson ofthe University Photographic Unit. The image of what turns out tobe Banksia baxteri from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine was made availableto me through the courtesy of the library of the Botanic Gardensand State Herbarium of South Australia.The watercolour by StanleyTapp of Sturt’s desert pea is reproduced by courtesy of the ArtGallery of Western Australia. With only two exceptions, all thisillustrative material was made available for reproduction withoutcost, a remarkable act of generosity.

I owe thanks for permission to quote several passages fromStephen Hopper et al. in the Introduction and Chapter 4; fromMichael Hough in Chapter 9; and a long passage by Michael Frith inthe Introduction.

A few readers may identify occasional ‘self-quotation’, words Ihave used before, but as these are modified and fitted to a newcontext, I hope they will be tolerated.

Finally, there are authors from whom I have not quoted atlength, but on whom I have drawn heavily for data and under-standing.Their work is, of course, listed in text and endmatter, but Iwould like to record the major sources again, here: David Baum,Wilfrid Blunt and T. William Stearn, Alex George, Lionel Gilbert,Sylvia Hallam, Diana Snape and Paul Wilson.

Drafts of this book have been read critically by friends, of whomBasil Balme has been outstanding: he has read every word. Otherhelpful readers include my wife, Marli Wallace, Stephen Forbes, AlexGeorge, Stephen Hopper, Andrew Saniga and Paul Wilson of theState Herbarium of Western Australia, who has tried to steer mearound the worst pitfalls of changing botanical nomenclature. None

v i i i A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s






of them bears any responsibility for the persisting shortcomings ofthe text.

I would also like to thank the staff of Cambridge UniversityPress, who have been a delight to work with, especially theCommissioning Editor, Kim Armitage. On behalf of the press, shecommissioned one book that was to be co-authored, and gotanother with one author. The final text has a broader focus thanoriginally intended and a different title. It is longer and more fullyillustrated than the original intention, yet has been accepted withgood grace. Such editorial indulgence is an author’s dream.

Old men forget. I will have failed to list all those who havehelped me along the way to this, my last and final book. Please, all ofyou, accept my sincere thanks.

George Seddon

A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s i x






P r e f a c e

‘ The Old Country ’ for my mother, Australian born, wasBritain, as for most of her generation, although she had never setfoot on its sacred soil. Neither had she ever been Home, althoughshe first left it (in central Queensland) at the age of twenty-three tobe married, and returned to it often.

For my generation, Australia is the old country. Many of ourlandscapes are old.Although they have undergone countless cycles ofweathering, they have not experienced the cataclysms of mountainbuilding resulting in the Rockies and the Sierras that transformedthe ‘New World’ and the Alps in the ‘Old World’ (thus made new).Massive glaciations later scoured both continents in the Ice Age,wiping the slate clean, a new beginning for plants and man.

Our last comparable Ice Age was in the Permian, not one millionbut more than two hundred million years ago, when most of thewestern third of the continent was scoured and scored, the striationssometimes still to be seen in the ancient granites and gneisses of theDarling Plateau near sunny Perth.

Geology is a continuum so, like every other land-mass, Australiahas rocks of all ages from the Archaeozoic – almost the beginning ofearth-time – to the present, including comparatively recent volcanicactivity in Victoria and the drowning of a substantial fringe of coastalland when the seas rose with the melting of Pleistocene ice some10 000 years ago. There are old rocks in every continent, but thePrecambrian in Australia is exposed over a large area, and wellstudied, largely because of its mineral riches.

As a political entity,Australia is a very young country.A few yearsago there was a rhetoric to go with it: we have the virility of theyoung, unlike the effete Europeans (other than, of course, the British,our immediate antecedents, whose virility is eternal). Now, of course,the tenses change. They change in the United States, whose youthis/was ‘one of its hoariest traditions’ (according to Oscar Wilde).They change in Australia, and in Britain. Old Father Thames maykeep rolling along (into the mighty sea), but the North Sea is a dropin the ocean, and young Father T hasn’t been rolling into it for long,either. Some Australian rivers have been following much the same

x i






course for much longer, but we do not have enough words fordegrees of ‘old’. ‘Ancient’ belongs to B-grade fiction. ‘Immemorial’sounds promising, but since nearly all of geological history is beyondthe reach of human memory (i.e. is immemorial) it is of little help indiscriminating degrees of ‘old’.

x i i P r e f a c e

Stromatolites atHamelin Pool,Shark Bay,WA, inthe intertidal zone,exposed (above) andsubmerged (below).They are severalthousand years old.photo: John Hanrahan






There is a rough dirt track leading south from the road fromPort Hedland to Marble Bar in north-western Australia that leads toan old mine site. Nearby, there are several outcrops of fossilstromatolites and they are among the oldest known evidence ofliving organisms. The stromatolites are in the Warrawoona Group,which are mostly volcanic lavas, but with some layers of sedimentaccumulated in shallow seas. Beneath these rocks, there is an angularunconformity or ancient erosion surface (a page missing in the localjournal of events); the eroded rocks have been dated to 3.515 billionyears. For erosion to take place, they had to be at the earth’s surface.This is the first reliably dated evidence of a stable crust. The worldwas beginning to assume its present form, so we are watching thecurtain go up. It must have gone up elsewhere, but this is the firstrecord, first by over half a billion years, in the East Pilbara. Now that’s old.

P r e f a c e x i i i

Fossil stromatolitesexposed to the

south of MarbleBar,WA, have beendated at 3.5 billion

years bp. In thiscase, the

past lies at theauthor’s feet.

photo: George Seddon






The English language has begun to adapt to the physicalcircumstance of Australia, especially in water words.‘Henley on Todd’is a brilliantly ironic conjunction. ‘Creek’ is not a salt-water inlet onthe Scottish coast, but a water-made channel, often dry. To say that’the creek’s running’ is incomprehensible in British English. Here,it means that there is moving water in it (for a change!).We have notyet been so inventive with degrees of old, although we need themmore than Europe or North America

There are also ways, however – perhaps surprising to some – inwhich Australia is physically young. It is, arguably, the youngest of thecontinents along with Antarctica, from which it had broken entirelyfree as a new and independent continent only by the Eocene, somesixty million years ago It is also very young latitudinally, which is tosay that it has only just arrived at its present latitude and is still onthe move. David Williamson once wrote a clever play called TravellingNorth, a title that could serve for our continent, and only for thisone. The other continents have also rifted apart by changinglongitude – by drifting sideways, if you like – but Australia is theonly continent that has moved almost from pole to equator.

Evolution, like geological processes, is a continuum, but it movesby fits and starts in response to local circumstance. Both the historyof the Australian flora itself and of our varying awareness of itillustrate the many complexities in the application of words like‘new’ and ‘old’, words whose apparent simplicity is a chimera, a will-o’-the-wisp dancing across a land not well understood.

Many of our plants have come from the south with the land-mass that carried them slowly north and, before that, from east andwest before the first rents in the Gondwanan fabric. By contrast, thehuman species has always come from the north or north-west, firstby island-hopping from the Indonesian archipelago, much morerecently from Europe, much further to the north and west, and morerecently still, from the nearer north in Asia.

In the northern hemisphere, the patterns of migration have beenquite different, and from all points of the compass. People movedinto Europe from Africa, much later all over the Mediterraneanworld as the Greeks and then the Romans moved out from theircentres; still later from the north with Anglo-Saxons and Vikings;west from Asia across the Bering Straits to North America, andfurther south into South America.These mass movements of humanpopulations continue today as Eastern Europe, northern Africa and

x i v P r e f a c e






the Middle East all decant their people into Western Europe. Theendless movements of people are driven by a multitude ofimperatives, but underlying them is the simple point that thegeography of the northern hemisphere makes it possible.

The Australian continent tells a dramatically different story.Therehas been no invasion from the south other than a few penguins, andminimal additions from east and west in our own hemisphere. Peoplehave come from the north to a continent that has come from thesouth, with a physical history that is nothing like that of any of theirhomelands – not the Indonesian archipelago, not Britain, Ireland,southern Europe, not southern China nor India nor Vietnam. Its bio-rhythms are remote from those of any of the lands to the north, andthey have been hard to learn.We live in old landscapes with limitedwater and soils of low fertility, yet with a rich flora that is adapted tothose conditions, as we are not.There is much to learn from it, butwe have been slow learners.

A definitive history of the use of indigenous plants (‘Australiannatives’) in our gardens has not yet been written. It is, to be sure, notattempted here. The story is one of progress, but also of stops andstarts, dead ends and new beginnings that led nowhere. Tocomprehend the pattern of events, one needs an understanding ofphysical constraints such as the early need for food and shelter, forliving with limited water supplies, then abundant water, now againrestricted and likely to remain so. Other keys to understanding arecultural predilections and echoes (the rapid propagation of theNorfolk Island pine, with its symmetrical branches on which it waseasy to hang northern European dreams); the erratic eruptions offashion (the planting of lemon-scented gums in inner-city frontyards);and the mistaken and short-lived belief that if you planted ‘natives’,you did not have to look after them. Underlying these considerationsis the fact that we are now essentially a suburban culture in largeurban conglomerations that themselves have had a brief history.

While I explore some of these key themes in The Old Country:Australian Landscapes, Plants and People, I also venture beyondgardening to tell stories about our flora, to show not only its delicacyand beauty, but also how much of our history has been tied up withplant exploration and with the collectors and their motives; and how,finally, awareness of this flora and its history can help us all tobecome better Australians.

P r e f a c e x v






A p o l o g i a

This book offers no more than illustrative examples of the uses andabuses of the Australian flora. For example, design with Australianplants is illustrated through the work of three pioneers (EdnaWalling, Ellis Stones and Oliver Dowell), but there are many more,like John Oldham, Gordon Ford, Grace Fraser and the remarkableenterprise at Monash University begun by Jock Marshall.

There have been many writers about the use of the Australianflora, from Thistle Y. Harris to Diana Snape, and their work, too, shouldbe a part of a comprehensive history. Paintings of the land and its floraare discussed at length here only in relation to banksias, by using thework of some major botanical artists; the complementary art ofphotography is not discussed, although it is used throughout the book.

The list of what I have not attempted could go on. Theseillustrative samples, moreover, are restricted to what I know at firsthand, so some parts of the land are under-represented. So be it.

There is, however, a secondary theme to these exploratory essays.It is a preoccupation with language, at two levels.The first is that thewords we use both reflect and affect the way we conceptualise theworld around us, and this has heightened importance in Australia, aland so unlike that in which our language evolved.The second is thatof the continuing struggle to establish a botanical nomenclature thatreflects phylogenetic patterns.

A n o t e o n t h e n a m i n g o f p l a n t s

Botanical nomenclature is a cross that anyone writing about plantshas to bear. For an Australian, it is a heavy one, because the flora ishuge and so little of it is well known. Jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata)and river red gum (E. camaldulensis) are so well known by theirpopular names that the scientific ones seem hardly needed – but‘peppermint’ in Western Australia refers to Agonis flexuosa, whereas inthe eastern states it is any one of several eucalypts (E. dives, E. piperita,E. elata and more).

To avoid misunderstanding, there is no escape from botanicalterminology, and the level of botanical literacy in Australia is high,

x v i P r e f a c e






but there are many intelligent, well-read thoughtful Australians whofind it an irritant. To them I offer sympathy and advice: skip thescientific names and look at the photographic images, whichcommunicate much better than words.

Even for the botanically literate, the scientific names, althoughinescapable, are an irritant. They are in flux, for three reasons. Therule of priority means that the first scientific name validly bestowedhas priority over later names given by plant collectors who gave aname without knowledge of an existing one. When earlier validnames turn up, they must take precedence over what have oftenbecome familiar ones. Calocephalus brownii, for example, was knownto gardeners for years: it is an attractively coralline white-grey shrubof the sea-side dunes, and its Greek name means ‘beautiful head’,which is appropriate. Now it has to be called Leucophyta browniibecause it is a valid prior name, but it is a dull one, meaning ‘whiteplant’ – it is also harder to remember, at least for me.

The second reason is that botanical research often shows that aplant assigned to a given genus or species is sufficiently different towarrant a new name. The genus Calandrinia illustrates both thesecases.The generic name was originally applied to species from bothSouth America and Australia, but when it was found that the twogroups differ enough to warrant two names, South America hadprior claim to Calandrinia; and the Australian genus was calledParakeelya, an Aboriginal name. No sooner had this been proposedthan it was discovered that the genus had been validly named asRumicastrum, which had priority.

The third reason for instability is that we are witnessing the birthof a new pathway to taxonomic understanding, that of molecularphylogenetics, using new tools, no longer depending on the nakedeye and simple microscope. Genetic relationships can now be tracedwith confidence.The outcome will be a substantial rewriting of thetextbook – Banksia and Dryandra will be merged, Acacia will be split,as Eucalyptus and Corymbia have already been split, the latter muchcloser to Angophora than to Eucalyptus.There is much more to come,since this is very much ‘work in progress’, and necessarilyincomplete. It should in time make taxonomy far more precise. Inthe meantime, we live with change.

P r e f a c e x v i i






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